NAIDOC Week 2026: What "Culturally Safe Care" Actually Requires of Aged Care Providers
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 50 and over make up an estimated 3.6% of the population eligible for aged care in Australia. But they represent just 1.3% of people in residential aged care, 2.9% of Commonwealth Home Support Programme recipients, and around 3.3–3.4% of Home Care Package recipients at each level. That gap, eligible at roughly three times the rate they're actually receiving residential care, isn't explained by lower need. If anything, need arrives earlier: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people become eligible for aged care from age 50, in recognition of significantly higher rates of chronic disease and lower life expectancy compared with the non-Indigenous population.
So the gap is about access, trust, and whether the system on offer feels safe to walk into. That's not a policy abstraction. It's something every facility manager and L&D lead has some control over, right now, in how their workforce is trained.
Why trust is the real barrier, not distance or eligibility
The 2025–2035 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Aged Care Framework, developed with the First Nations Aged Care Governance Group, is blunt about why uptake is so low. Trust in, and understanding of, mainstream aged care services is generally low among older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, a legacy of previous negative and culturally unsafe experiences with mainstream institutions. That mistrust means Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander aged care providers end up doing a lot of unfunded, informal education just to help people navigate a system that wasn't built with them in mind.
The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety flagged this directly: despite greater and earlier need, older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people generally have poorer experiences of the aged care system than the general population.
What's changed under the new Act, and what hasn't
Since 1 November 2025, the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards and the new Aged Care Act have made cultural safety an explicit, rights-based expectation rather than a nice-to-have. The Act's Statement of Rights specifically guarantees the right to have culture, language and traditions respected. Three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander assessment organisations are now operating, giving people a genuine choice to be assessed by an organisation that understands their context rather than a generic mainstream one.
The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ageing and Aged Care Council, working with the sector, has also landed on a formal definition of cultural safety for aged care. It's worth sitting with, because it puts the judgement call in a place many providers aren't used to putting it: with the person receiving care, not the provider delivering it. Cultural safety, in this definition, can only be determined by the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person on the receiving end of the interaction. A provider can't self-certify as culturally safe. It's assessed, every time, by the person in front of them.
That's a genuinely different standard to "we did the training once." Cultural safety has to show up in day-to-day practice: in how a support worker greets someone, how a care plan handles connection to Country or Island Home, how family and community involvement is treated as central rather than an inconvenience to visiting hours.
What this means for your training approach
A single cultural awareness module ticked off during induction won't meet this bar, and it's worth being honest with your team about that. The framework calls for trauma-aware, healing-informed practice, recognising that for many older Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the trauma of past government and institutional policy is lived experience, not history, and it shapes how they'll engage with your service from the first phone call.
Practical starting points for facility managers and L&D leads heading into NAIDOC Week:
Audit who's actually doing the training. Content developed with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander input, including Elders, community-controlled organisations and lived experience, carries a credibility that generic diversity content doesn't.
Make it ongoing, not annual. One NAIDOC Week session a year signals a compliance exercise, not a genuine shift in practice. Build cultural safety into onboarding and into your ongoing clinical education cycle.
Connect it to your Standard 1 and Standard 5 evidence. Under the strengthened Standards, assessors will want to see cultural safety reflected in individual care planning and clinical care delivery, not sitting separately as a HR initiative.
Ask the uncomfortable question. If an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person walked into your facility today, would they feel safe enough to stay? If you're not sure, that uncertainty is itself useful information.
NAIDOC Week is a good moment to run a session, share a story, mark the occasion visibly. But the fifty-year milestone this year is also a fair prompt to ask what your organisation is doing differently on 13 July.
Altura Learning's clinical education library includes courses developed to support person-centred, culturally responsive care planning under the Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards. If your team's cultural safety training hasn't been refreshed since the new Standards took effect, it's worth a look.
Need more support?
Book your free 15-minute consultation call with Dr. Roshmeen Azam
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